Poor generator maintenance led to widespread service disruption in the DC area.

The FCC has released a new report blaming Verizon and Frontier Communications for widespread and largely preventable service outages during a major storm that hit the mid-Atlantic region in June of 2012. After the storm knocked out power grids in parts of Virginia and West Virginia, key generators failed to start, leading to widespread outages in landline phone service. As a result, thousands of 911 calls failed to connect.

The storm, which hit the Washington DC metro area and parts of West Virginia and Ohio, was a "derecho," characterized by strong, straight-line winds. Unlike hurricanes, derechos can crop up suddenly and therefore don't give service providers much time to prepare for them.

Still, the FCC says Verizon did have some warning that its network was not ready for prime time. Unfortunately, it failed to move quickly enough to address the problem. Verizon's records show that two days before the storm hit, a generator in the company's Arlington central office failed a routine reliability test. When the storm hit, the generator failed, leaving the office on battery power which only lasted for a few hours. As a result, the office was without power for about 8 hours on the morning of June 30.

"The failure of backup power at the Arlington central office directly resulted in the loss of 9-1-1 service to residents in northern Virginia, key switching capabilities, and virtually all of Verizon’s network monitoring capabilities in the area," the FCC reports. "These high-impact failures could have been prevented, or at least mitigated," through the use of "best practices and other sound engineering practices."

A Verizon central office in Fairfax, Virginia, suffered a similar fate. The Fairfax office had two different generators that were supposed to power equipment on different floors of the building. But one of them failed, and the battery failed before it could be replaced. Indeed, when a technician arrived on the scene the next morning, he checked the working generator but didn't notice that the other generator had failed for several hours.

Frontier Communications, which operates a telephone network in West Virginia, also suffered outages due to generator failures. But these failures affected fewer people in the sparsely populated state.

Overall, the FCC says that 17 Public Safety Answering Points—the call centers that accept 911 calls—completely lost connectivity due to these network failures. Eleven centers failed in West Virginia, four occurred in Virginia, and 2 in Ohio. Several dozen other call centers suffered from overloaded circuits or other problems.

The report was more positive about how the nation's major wireless carriers handled the storm. "Cell site outage rates during and after the storm varied by provider and jurisdiction, but were modest both in number and duration in comparison to other superstorms or hurricanes," the report said.

In the first two days after the derecho, about 10 percent of cell phone towers in the affected area were unreachable. By the fourth day, the number of outages had declined to about 2 percent. "Impacts on service were not nearly as pervasive as might have been expected, and most outages were rectified relatively quickly," the FCC concluded.

The FCC wants Verizon and other network operators to make their networks more reliable in the face of natural disasters. The commission says that network operators should ensure that central offices have redundant power supplies and that these backup systems be tested regularly and replaced promptly when they fail those tests. It also suggested a greater effort to eliminate single points of failure in the telephone network so that operators can quickly route around failed equipment and keep most of the network operating smoothly.

The FCC's investigation was mostly conducted prior to Superstorm Sandy, which devastated the Northeast in late October. The commission says it expects a future report to examine the "widespread and severe impacts on communications" produced by that natural disaster.

Promoted Comments

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

Is it any surprise to anyone that cell service doesn't handle disasters well? It's _never_ handled them well; even if the generators work, the towers stay up, and everything physically works the networks get swamped almost immediately.

But how does an engineer convince a finance-major CFO to fund/hire to meet best engineering practices? Reminds me of the Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Cutting costs to save money = big failures.

Which is why it's so wonderful that we seem determined to turn critical infrastructure over to private sector, and in turn place what should be long term decisions and investments (and particularly focused on the good of the public) under the scrutiny of quarterly profits. Especially in infrastructure related industries where competition, particularly on local levels, is almost non existent, so there's really no capitalistic related gain in having it be handled privately.

You can fine all you want. There are too many other behavioral pressures involved, it's still going to happen if you leave it up to those choices.

I think a major concern is the population turning to cell coverage as the sole source of communication rather than owning a land-line. As this phenomenon becomes more prevalent, the major wireless companies will be under more pressure for fail-safe systems in the event of emergencies. For example, I lost power during the last Wisconsin blizzard and relied on cell service to inform my power provider of the outage. Had I not had cell service, a minor inconvenience could have been life-threatening.

Is it any surprise to anyone that cell service doesn't handle disasters well? It's _never_ handled them well; even if the generators work, the towers stay up, and everything physically works the networks get swamped almost immediately.

To be clear, the article is talking about landlines. After the storm, we were without even landline capability for quite a while.

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

Is it any surprise to anyone that cell service doesn't handle disasters well? It's _never_ handled them well; even if the generators work, the towers stay up, and everything physically works the networks get swamped almost immediately.

You do realize that they actually said that cell service did well, right?

Oh wait, no, you didn't even read the article.

Quote:

The report was more positive about how the nation's major wireless carriers handled the storm. "Cell site outage rates during and after the storm varied by provider and jurisdiction, but were modest both in number and duration in comparison to other superstorms or hurricanes," the report said.

But how does an engineer convince a finance-major CFO to fund/hire to meet best engineering practices? Reminds me of the Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Cutting costs to save money = big failures.

Exactly. Unless the FCC comes down with a legal mandate or multibillion dollar fine, the telcos won't do anything, much less do something about a mere report.

Fines in the thousands or millions? Change in the sofa for a telco. It's the equivalent of fining someone $.50 for something.

Personally, I think one major injury or life lost due to shoddy practices is worth a 1 billion dollar fine, especially if it was preventable.

They should be fined certainly, but it should also be proportionate to the violation at hand. Bat shit crazy fines like 1bn for relatively minor infractions makes about as much sense as dishing out $2,000 speeding tickets for going 10 over.

They should be fined certainly, but it should also be proportionate to the violation at hand. Bat shit crazy fines like 1bn for relatively minor infractions makes about as much sense as dishing out $2,000 speeding tickets for going 10 over.

Plus we all know who will ultimately pay those fines.

What I would like to see is a fine that actually acts as a deterrent to poor practices. In other words, it should cost more to face a fine than to behave improperly.

As it is, most government fines on businesses are utterly laughable as a detriment. They are using numbers from the 1920's.

One billion is hardly bat shit crazy as a fine. TTM, Verizon earned 31.7 billion (EBITDA) on revenue of 114 billion. Explain to me how a one billion dollar fine crushes the life out of such a company? It is less than 1% of revenue. It would be the equivalent of someone making $114,000/year paying a $1,000 fine. Hardly devastating. But maybe enough to make someone take notice.

Do you really think even one billion means jack to a company as big as Verizon? It would basically impact ONE quarterly earnings report, if at all. As a matter of fact, looking at their numbers, they have over 10 billion in cash. So in fact, it would not even impact their quarterly profits, if they chose to pay with cash on hand.

Is it any surprise to anyone that cell service doesn't handle disasters well? It's _never_ handled them well; even if the generators work, the towers stay up, and everything physically works the networks get swamped almost immediately.

To be clear, the article is talking about landlines. After the storm, we were without even landline capability for quite a while.

I guess I forgot Verizon does anything other than cell since I'm a VZW customer, but never dealt with their DSL or landline phone divisions. It never specifically says anything about lines, just generators at various facilities, so I put 2 and 2 together and got 5.

Titanium Dragon wrote:

Boskone wrote:

Is it any surprise to anyone that cell service doesn't handle disasters well? It's _never_ handled them well; even if the generators work, the towers stay up, and everything physically works the networks get swamped almost immediately.

You do realize that they actually said that cell service did well, right?

Oh wait, no, you didn't even read the article.

Quote:

The report was more positive about how the nation's major wireless carriers handled the storm. "Cell site outage rates during and after the storm varied by provider and jurisdiction, but were modest both in number and duration in comparison to other superstorms or hurricanes," the report said.

RTFA.

You do realize they never actually specified it was lines, just generators at facilities?

Oh, wait, no, you just decided to be an ass instead of politely correcting.

They should be fined certainly, but it should also be proportionate to the violation at hand. Bat shit crazy fines like 1bn for relatively minor infractions makes about as much sense as dishing out $2,000 speeding tickets for going 10 over.

Plus we all know who will ultimately pay those fines.

What I would like to see is a fine that actually acts as a deterrent to poor practices. In other words, it should cost more to face a fine than to behave improperly.

As it is, most government fines on businesses are utterly laughable as a detriment. They are using numbers from the 1920's.

One billion is hardly bat shit crazy as a fine. TTM, Verizon earned 31.7 billion (EBITDA) on revenue of 114 billion. Explain to me how a one billion dollar fine crushes the life out of such a company? It is less than 1% of revenue. It would be the equivalent of someone making $114,000/year paying a $1,000 fine. Hardly devastating. But maybe enough to make someone take notice.

Do you really think even one billion means jack to a company as big as Verizon? It would basically impact ONE quarterly earnings report, if at all. As a matter of fact, looking at their numbers, they have over 10 billion in cash. So in fact, it would not even impact their quarterly profits, if they chose to pay with cash on hand.

Did Verizon hire laid off Circuit City managers to run the company? This is the same type of incompetency that dragged Circuit City into the abyss. Sounds like they hired people who didn't have training so they could pay them less than people people who could perform the job, AND THEN failed to train them to perform the job they were hired to do!

They could fix this by spending more on upkeep and repairs, but where would they get the money for it? There's only so much pilfered cash to go around, and they have to keep a large stock of it on hand so their board has something to roll around naked in. Guess they'll just have to raise prices again.

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

In Finland the ball bark figure is from 1½ to 3 times as much, depending on ground quality. If there are a lot of stones, and in Finland there usually is, or tree stumps it'll need an excavator.

On the other hand a ground cable is practically maintenance free so the costs of initial investments is compensated by the lesser maintenance costs.

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

Doesn't help as much in earthquake or flood prone country.

I don't think floods affect the cables as I live near flood prone area and they are all underground. I belive all water supply pipes are also hidden underground in US. If pipes can survive the cables should too as they are probably hidden in pipes.

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground.

In my experience, all new suburban developments have completely underground utilities. That's the best way to do it, where all the lines to the houses are also run underground at construction time and trenching can be done before finished driveways and such.

Retrofitting it doesn't just have the cost of moving the main lines underground, it also requires replacing the runs to the houses. And ideally you would move all the utilities at the same time as everything is torn up, so invite the cable and telephone companies too, but now you have to coordinate schedules and budgets and it's a nightmare.

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

The lifetime for underground utilities is only about half of what it is for above ground. Add in a 2-10x increase in cost to install, what little downtime you have is more than acceptable.

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground.

In my experience, all new suburban developments have completely underground utilities. That's the best way to do it, where all the lines to the houses are also run underground at construction time and trenching can be done before finished driveways and such.

Retrofitting it doesn't just have the cost of moving the main lines underground, it also requires replacing the runs to the houses. And ideally you would move all the utilities at the same time as everything is torn up, so invite the cable and telephone companies too, but now you have to coordinate schedules and budgets and it's a nightmare.

Bingo. New construction will usually include underground lines and services. Retrofits are crazy expensive. A retrofit means tearing up road ways, sidewalks, yards etc. That means replacing all that stuff when they're done.

To just move the stuff underground makes zero sense. When they have to replace it for one reason or another they can start thinking about moving it.

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

In short, it depends on whether you're talking about rural or urban areas, but as others noted at least a 2x-10x cost vs. overhead seems to be common. And there's a shorter lifespan. And backhoes. And potentially a longer repair time when there is an outage.

I don't believe this report (with numbers like the cost per customer would be $3K/year) is simply stonewalling by the industry. Regulated utilities are allowed to earn a set return on their approved capital investments that they make to satisfy reliability and/or regulatory requirements. So my guess would be that the utilities would be more than happy to have the regulatory bodies tell them they have to invest billions of dollars in burying power lines as they would get to earn their x% on that investment through higher rates.

Note that even where electricity is "deregulated", it's the generation that's open to competition. I don't believe distribution (the wires to your home) is deregulated anywhere: no competing suppliers are building a new set of power lines to your home.

Disclosure: I do work for an electric company, but in IT, not on the business / policy side and I speak only for myself, not my company.

There's a lot of talk of trenching for putting these cables underground, but i don't think that's entirely necessary. Here in southern Maryland, they recently installed 3 (one orange, one black, one green) wrist sized fiber cables along major highways with businesses. They used some sort of horizontal drilling method so the only digging they had to do was at the splice points between the spools of fiber they just laid out. This could be an option to keep costs and surface disruptions down.

There's a lot of talk of trenching for putting these cables underground, but i don't think that's entirely necessary. Here in southern Maryland, they recently installed 3 (one orange, one black, one green) wrist sized fiber cables along major highways with businesses. They used some sort of horizontal drilling method so the only digging they had to do was at the splice points between the spools of fiber they just laid out. This could be an option to keep costs and surface disruptions down.

Mediacom just (last summer/fall) replaced all their high lines in my neighborhood of 30-year-old houses with underground lines. Their horizontal drillers came up for air every 1000 feet or so, and they replaced the foot-square chunk of grass they cut up so well I couldn't tell where the splice was after the fact.

Horizontal drilling is old tech, and the PUC is burying power lines along the "scenic routes" of town just fine. It can be done, when the will is there.

Hmmm... It just struck me. I wonder what horizontal-drilling company suddenly got several large contracts?

The FCC wants Verizon and other network operators to make their networks more reliable in the face of natural disasters

An yet one recent discussion at CES (IIFC) was about phones going all IP and the telcos scampering away from any FCC reliability requirements. Cable doesn't have it...Fiber doesn't have it.... those are data services and aren't regulated the same way. Congress is too bought to fix that mess for the FCC to make proper rules.

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

Cost depends. It might be cheaper in the long run to bury it all. Now cost to teleco might of course be high, but what about the economic costs of lost telephone service? What about the economic costs of millions of people who lost power for a day or two and the hundreds of thousands who lost power for days (I have a friend who was without power for 6 days after the storm. They got a generator for Christmas this year).

Then as I mentioned above, what about the economic costs individuals take to mitigate future effects of service loss or power loss?

I don't have numbers on any of that, I have no idea what it would be. However, would it potentially be cheaper (again, I have ZERO idea) to say have a one time $100 service charge for each customer, or whatever the cost, for the utilties to come in and bury everything that isn't REQUIRED to stay above ground (like say major power distribution lines probably can't be buried, but residential power, cable, fiber, etc doesn't need to be up on the pole).

After moving I am worried about my future power where I am. I moved somewhat more rural in my county and in the month I have moved we have had the power drop out 6 times. No real outage, more of a sag (well, probably did drop to zero or near zero volts). It was 3 times each on different days, but according to my local utility, supposedly high winds were causing service disruptions. Longest outage was about 3 minutes, shortest about 5 seconds.

Both days we saw some 20-30mph winds with a few 40-60mph gusts in there.

Makes me worried what might happen when a REAL storm blow through. My power is buried from the pole to my house (about the only one in the neighborhood who's line is), but the neighborhood's lines run right along the back of my property and very much on a pole.

My old townhouse I moved out of where 99% of the residential power lines where buried in that part of the county, we lost power twice in 5 1/2 years of living there. Once was for about 5 minutes. The second time was for about an hour during a major storm.

My stop gap mitigation was buying a UPS (550va/350w, 5.5Ah 12v battery in it) for my server and networking gear to keep sags/dropouts from taking my server down. I'll probably do the same for my desktop. Longer term I am looking at a gas generator (~$600 for the size I need and reliability, plus gas and maintenance) or possibly DIY solar generator and battery storage (100w generation + 100ah/12v and ~2000w pure sine wave inverter would run roughly the same as the gas powered generator with effectively no maintenance and no fuel costs, 200w solar + 200ah/12v + 2000w pure sine wave would be more like $800). Upside is former owners had installed a generator cut over panel already so everything is wired, all I'd need to do is connect a gas generator to the outlet or connect a solar generator to the outlet. Not encouraging that there is a geny panel though.

So for me personally, I could trade up spending between $600-800 on a gas/solar power backup solution for $600-800 worth of costs for having my residential and other powerlines and utilities buried and be break even. More if you count the UPS costs (though, I guess when it comes down to it, a UPS is good insurance no matter how reliable the local grid is as nothing is 100%, and trashing my server is not exactly ideal because of a really inopportune outage).

But how does an engineer convince a finance-major CFO to fund/hire to meet best engineering practices? Reminds me of the Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Cutting costs to save money = big failures.

Exactly. Unless the FCC comes down with a legal mandate or multibillion dollar fine, the telcos won't do anything, much less do something about a mere report.

Fines in the thousands or millions? Change in the sofa for a telco. It's the equivalent of fining someone $.50 for something.

Personally, I think one major injury or life lost due to shoddy practices is worth a 1 billion dollar fine, especially if it was preventable.

Actually, I think rather than punishing a range of money, we should be setting punishments that are designed to punish based on the offender. A $1M fine is nothing to Verizon, but everything to me.

In some countries, there are 'day fines'. You take income, set aside a base amount for costs, divide by days in the year, and you have a 'day amount (the forumla and amounts vary by the country)'.

You fine x number of days. a 30 day fine is significant to me, and significant to Verizon. And thus we have penalties that are approriate to the offender, where you don't end up 'too big' for it to be a punishment. We'd soon see less instances of companies finding it cheaper to break the law.

But how does an engineer convince a finance-major CFO to fund/hire to meet best engineering practices? Reminds me of the Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Cutting costs to save money = big failures.

Exactly. Unless the FCC comes down with a legal mandate or multibillion dollar fine, the telcos won't do anything, much less do something about a mere report.

Fines in the thousands or millions? Change in the sofa for a telco. It's the equivalent of fining someone $.50 for something.

Personally, I think one major injury or life lost due to shoddy practices is worth a 1 billion dollar fine, especially if it was preventable.

Actually, I think rather than punishing a range of money, we should be setting punishments that are designed to punish based on the offender. A $1M fine is nothing to Verizon, but everything to me.

In some countries, there are 'day fines'. You take income, set aside a base amount for costs, divide by days in the year, and you have a 'day amount (the forumla and amounts vary by the country)'.

You fine x number of days. a 30 day fine is significant to me, and significant to Verizon. And thus we have penalties that are approriate to the offender, where you don't end up 'too big' for it to be a punishment. We'd soon see less instances of companies finding it cheaper to break the law.

Yes, I agree with having fines that actually act as a deterrent.

The NBA has finally started doing this. Instead of worthless $5,000 fines for people with multi-million dollar bank accounts, they are now levying fines the hundred thousand and up range.

FYI, a 30 day fine for Verizon would be over 9 billion. It just shows how minuscule typical government fines are to a large corporation. Even a 9 billion dollar fine would only be a short term annoyance to a company like Verizon. Though it would probably cause them to change their risk policies.

But how does an engineer convince a finance-major CFO to fund/hire to meet best engineering practices? Reminds me of the Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Cutting costs to save money = big failures.

Exactly. Unless the FCC comes down with a legal mandate or multibillion dollar fine, the telcos won't do anything, much less do something about a mere report.

Fines in the thousands or millions? Change in the sofa for a telco. It's the equivalent of fining someone $.50 for something.

Personally, I think one major injury or life lost due to shoddy practices is worth a 1 billion dollar fine, especially if it was preventable.

Actually, I think rather than punishing a range of money, we should be setting punishments that are designed to punish based on the offender. A $1M fine is nothing to Verizon, but everything to me.

In some countries, there are 'day fines'. You take income, set aside a base amount for costs, divide by days in the year, and you have a 'day amount (the forumla and amounts vary by the country)'.

You fine x number of days. a 30 day fine is significant to me, and significant to Verizon. And thus we have penalties that are approriate to the offender, where you don't end up 'too big' for it to be a punishment. We'd soon see less instances of companies finding it cheaper to break the law.

Yes, I agree with having fines that actually act as a deterrent.

The NBA has finally started doing this. Instead of worthless $5,000 fines for people with multi-million dollar bank accounts, they are now levying fines the hundred thousand and up range.

FYI, a 30 day fine for Verizon would be over 9 billion. It just shows how minuscule typical government fines are to a large corporation. Even a 9 billion dollar fine would only be a short term annoyance to a company like Verizon. Though it would probably cause them to change their risk policies.

Right, and you know what they say, 9 Billion here, 9 Billion there, and soon you have a real chunk of change.

But think about the others, like HSBC and Barclays/Libor, or Haliburton/BP and Deepwater Horizons. In the latter, BP is paying $4.5B, or a 4.2-day fine (2011 revenue was $386 Billion). A 30-day fine would be $31B (or 123% of 2011's net income) and a real indication of punishment.

How about for starters (relating to the photo and not the generators mentioned in the article) start mandating that the utilities begin placing any new builds and then set a timeline to where aerial runs of lines are all underground. This 150+ year old practice should come to an end. On recent trips to Europe, I tried to compare the town I was in to my hometown. Even out in rural areas, all utilities I normally see on poles back home were underground there. Not only does it make the system more reliable, it aesthetically is pleasing.

In stormy areas of the country where x amount of wind and snow/ice accumulate, this should be the norm. But then again, what will the cost be??

Doesn't help as much in earthquake or flood prone country.

I don't think floods affect the cables as I live near flood prone area and they are all underground. I belive all water supply pipes are also hidden underground in US. If pipes can survive the cables should too as they are probably hidden in pipes.

Perhaps flooding would not affect fiber optic or other telecommunications cable, but it would certainly affect power cables which would likely also be buried in any such project.

One billion is hardly bat shit crazy as a fine. TTM, Verizon earned 31.7 billion (EBITDA) on revenue of 114 billion. Explain to me how a one billion dollar fine crushes the life out of such a company? It is less than 1% of revenue. It would be the equivalent of someone making $114,000/year paying a $1,000 fine. Hardly devastating. But maybe enough to make someone take notice.

I would like to see the fines match the damages caused + cost to improve the system + 25% (of prior 2 costs) penalty.

The damages should be awarded to those affected and harmed (ex person who couldn't call 911).Cost to improve system would be held by FCC but some portion of it would be allowed to be refunded to the teleco for actually implementing improvements they should have done already. (Its one thing to criticize and punish, its another to be spiteful without actually improving the situation.)The penalty should be used to fund improvements to make the overall system or 911 system more resilient. The actually penalty doesn't have to be 25% but needs to be severe enough that it won't benefit the teleco to postpone action till after a disaster.

Timothy B. Lee / Timothy covers tech policy for Ars, with a particular focus on patent and copyright law, privacy, free speech, and open government. His writing has appeared in Slate, Reason, Wired, and the New York Times.